Advice on Buying Art

Alan Bamberger writes an article on art collecting that offers a very reasoned and lucid set of questions that prospective collectors should ask themselves when buying art. Bamberger is a San Francisco based art consultant whose website offers lots of good counsel and common sense for both artists and collectors.

Having said that, I would point out that using Bamberger's advice a collector of the 1890s would have been wise to ignore Vincent Van Gogh, who was an unknown artist, working in an idiosyncratic style, had been largely self-taught and who was recommended by almost no one. And similarly, we would judge based on Bamberger's advice that Damiem Hirst is "it," being the highest paid, living artist in the history of mankind. But Hirst is not it. He is the art version of a junk bond.

Bamberger is giving first rate advice in his piece. But the missing element is taste, intelligence, sensibility, having good hunches, having a great eye ... is all tied up with some kind of je ne sais quoi logic that combines various felicitous abilities. Buying really fine quality art involves one in an intellectual quest for which no amount of advice from the status quo can help. It's a little like getting married. Your relatives can all weigh in with their two cents, but it's your heart.

Knowing how to see the kind of powerful visual idea that will be tomorrow's acclaimed masterpiece means being in the right place at the right time (for buying a Van Gogh in 1890 it would have meant being in France and being friendly with Theo Van Gogh) and having a strong inner sense of what constitutes both beauty and meaning.

However, this is not a bad outcome. We were meant to wonder about these things and to search for them.

Otherwise, I'd say heed Bamberger's advice. Buy things you love. Make certain of their pedigree with as much information as you can get. But if you want to buy truly great art, the kind that is "boldly going where no one has gone before," you have to step outside the comfort zone of the status quo and go with your gut. And your luck!

[The painting that illustrates this post is by Ignacio Iturria, contemporary Uraguayan painter.]

Opportunity

I am a captured moment of time.
I stand on a ball constatly turning
I have wings on my feet
and a razor in my hand.
You may grasp me
by the lock of hair on my forehead
but the back of my head is shaved
so that once I take my leave,
I cannot be held.

From this site.

If you have an idea: Draw it

Let your thoughts be visual thoughts. The appearances of things are so marvellous, and meaning will get dragged in whether you wish it or not.

So draw!

How to draw

Begin with something you like. Take a pencil. Draw the lines that you believe describe this thing in the most direct way you know. Put lines down like you mean them. Draw boldly. This drawing of a shell was made by a child of nine.

To draw with directness of this kind makes a great beginning. It connects you to things. Objects will not be just appearances that you name: they will become shapes and forms and gestures.

Drawing

For a long time I remembered a passage I'd read somewhere about Degas, that his was the art of the "ensemble." A group of dancers, a group of horses, the audience of a concert, or the loitering people at the ballet rehearsal, all these collections of things have the sense of being united in very natural and unself-conscious ways. Ever since reading that -- and of course noting it in Degas's pictures -- I have had some curiosity about how to capture a similar sense of things in my paintings.

This drawing of horses is made from my daughter's toys. I arranged them to overlap, to seem as though they were moving in a line together, perhaps out of a corral. Drawing them, one thinks about real horses and wants them to seem life-like. Yet, I also think about them as toys. They have many happy associations as my daughter's toys, all the loveliness of watching her learn and grow.

The green that surrounds the horses is added without reference to anything. It's amazing how just the addition of the color creates the beginnings of landscape and weather and temperature.

The spiral coil of the notebook, the fact that the drawing spilled over into the facing page, prevents this drawing from being framed for sale. But artists of course have drawings that are made strictly for personal reasons, and they should always make many such drawings. Some of the best drawings in history were privately made for the appreciative audience of one.

The art of writing about art

I have been practicing writing about my paintings. Some people are visually sensitive by nature. Others need a little help understanding visual things. So, writing about the paintings is meant to help the less visual person acquire a more nuanced understanding of the purely visual aspect of a painting. The difficulty that some people have with paintings arises from a certain reluctance to give themselves over to the pure enjoyment of a visual spectacle. As a species, we tend to trust words over and above images.

Any number of things are beautiful. (I will leave it a tacit argument for the present that most great art is in some manner fundamentally beautiful, whatever else it might be.) Almost anybody will tell you that a sunset is beautiful, though how many people will go out of their way to observe the sunset? How many people would schedule their hours so that they could be outdoors when sunset occurs? Or finding themselves in front of a beautiful sunset, how many people will stand and gaze at the changing colors, the effects of light and dark that tinges the entire landscape? How many will watch the light until it departs and revell in the glory of the spectacle? And a sunset is after all reality.

A painting is a simulacrum. Oddly people will sometimes spend more time gazing at and studying a painting than they would spend studying the reality. (This, of course, is not something that an artist complains about.) When people study paintings in that scrutinizing way, they are sometimes trying to figure out how it is done -- how it is possible that the image looks so "real"? This response equates painting almost with magic. (Again, the artist profits by such interest so we won't complain.)

But the element of the painting that most deserves our continued attention is not the mechanics of it, but its beauty -- the grace, the rightness of colors, the fineness of effects, the harmony of the whole. All these things will bring along with them meanings, thoughts, memories, insights, feelings. All these things are fine qualities to linger over also.

A really great painting helps reveals parts of ourselves to us. It enlarges our world.

It's things like this that I try to write about with regard to my own painting. I do so in part to help the audience see the picture better. But I also do it to help me see my own picture better. Sometimes I learn things that help me continue deeper into the picture. It's then that writing becomes a form of visual invention.

Thinking about the Imagination

I recently found an enthusiastic buyer for an image that has found many admirers. It has reminded me that when you make images that relate to life, people will be attracted to them. The crazy art world appeals to ideas that people have about what art is "supposed" to be, but art that explores life (in contrast) takes its meaning from several places, all of which are authentic.

First it takes some of its meaning from life. If you observe the world, you discover the meanings that inhere in real things. So a still life of food has the meanings that food has -- nurture, pleasure, providence, sensuality (it depends upon the character of the image, does it not, what kind of feeling-tone will affix itself to the image). The second place where meaning enters is in the visual character of the thing, whether it is light or dark, richly colored or muted, crisply delineated or adumbrated, large or small, busy or simple, and so on. All the myriad qualities that can characterize something each bring forth different sensibilities. And the third place where meaning enters is from the spectator's personal associations with the image, the ways that it connects to an individual life -- perhaps quite arbitrarily -- whether it is the artist's life or somebody else's.

Art that does connect in this way really begins to have a life of its own. If in addition to all these things, the image is crafted with mastery -- well, maybe it becomes a great work of art.

We're recently experiencing a crisis in the real estate industry that has begun to spill over into related businesses. It's causing some uncertainly in the markets. I suppose that means that real art is a particularly good investment now. Of course, great art is always a good investment. People have trouble trying to sort out what "great art" is. (Hint: it's not the stuff you see in the trendy museums, the stuff you stand in front of, scratching your head wondering what it is).

If an image draws you in, if it is somehow incredibly beautiful, if it has meaning that deepens the more you think about it, if it is skillful and not ordinary, and yet can speak to ordinary life -- the chances are quite good that it's "the real deal," real art, maybe great art.

I'm certainly trying to make my pictures ones that collectors will profit by owning. When my work appreciates in value, it will benefit the collector and me together. But the first profit I wish to see from it is an increase in its meaningfulness.

Art ought to really matter. Real art does really matter. And that's what makes it real.